LibraryThing adds "Groups"
Today we're going public with a new Groups feature, a major new "social" feature. Groups were developed by Robyn, LibraryThing's newest employee (and the last one hiding in the shadows, we promise). Check out the Groups homepage, all groups, or groups like Mainers and Knitters.You can do three main things with groups:
- Search all members' libraries at once. LibraryThing links accounts into a "virtual" combined library.
- Talk among the group. Groups come with a message board which demos LibraryThing's new forum. The message boards demo the new forum features, including "touchstones." Group forums will become "threaded" (more complex) later, if groups choose.
- Check out the Group Zeitgeist. Spot shared books, track recently-added books, etc.
- Real-world clubs. Groups can unite all the collections of a real-world organization, like a book group, a college club, a branch of the SCA, a church—heck, a bowling league—search for books, arrange swaps, etc. You can even post meeting times, etc.
- Virtual clubs. LibraryThing members have already set up groups for Knitters*, British and Irish Crime Fiction, Ancient History enthusiasts, Pagans, and many others.
- Friends and lovers. You can set up a group for your friends, significant others and family members. You can make a group private and invitation-only.
Robyn Overstreet (LT: robynover) is a web developer and new media artist. Before joining LibraryThing, she worked as a web developer for the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations. She is a recent graduate of NYU's Masters Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)**, where she studied social software, as well as programming, design, and electronics. With a background in creative writing, Robyn's interests include exploring the connections between formal poetry and computer programming languages. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.Robyn's email is Robyn
LibraryThing.com. She will also be posting on the Google Group and on the comments here. As usual, your comments are much appreciated. We don't produce "finished" stuff and then ask you to like it or lump it. We produce something minimal and then see where you want us to take it.****The LiveJournal Knitters community were kind enough to start a day early, and provided valuable feedback.
**Clay Shirky, woo-hoo!
***For example, we're not getting rid of the tags tab, apparently. It would have caused a revolution. I'm not even gonna talk about the 50-covers thing!
posted by Tim at 5:42 PM
43 Comments:
Fantastic. Thanks!
tdhopper
Since adding the GROUPS tab my SEARCH and FUN-TOOLS tabs are now hidden when I use the "my catalog" page. All other pages such as "my profile" do not cover these 2 tags. Could you deep6 the PPSSSSSSSSTT instead of the Search? ;-)
Using IE windowsXP
Thanks. Define "hidden." They don't go down to another level (itself bad, of course)?
This is truly becoming the myspace of book collecting, but far better of course :) Keep up the great work!
And thank you.
Re hidden tabs
Looks good now, thanks....I see joy has replaced funtools .
The only concern I've noticed is how narrow the text box is for typing - even doubled would be a marvelous improvement. Otherwise: congratulations and thanks! It's wonderful.
Great value add!
Only one suggestion right now: add the capability for search to include description. Might avoid an overabundance of groups with essentially the same focus, but which were created simply because someone didn't find their interest by an exact search on a cryptic group title.
libguy
Eurydice: Give me more details. Is there "space"? What's your browser and OS again?
Anonymous: It DOES include the description. At least it should!
The message boards demo the new forum features, including "touchstones."
Please, what does "touchstone" mean in this context?
Never mind. I saw the explanation when I posted in a group.
Bravo Tim and team, I swear - everytime I logon a new surprise appears!
Bravo to Robyn, I must say. As for surprises, sometimes when you log in the site is down... :)
It's like a box of chocolates, as they say.
Tim: Mac OS X and Safari. The text window is maybe an inch wide; the space for touchstones perhaps three times that (I'm guessing). Lines of text get broken up a lot, though it works. Others have mentioned it in their posts, as well.
It's a little irritating. - But I love the groups.
Eurydice. Ah I see waht you mean. You need to be using a small window. But the right's size is fixed, and the left gets as small as it needs to be. Fixing...
I'm trying to work out what the common mistakes are that lead to only some of the touchstones to work in people's group posts. Some seem to link back to the group instead of the work.
And some seem to be underlined when I mouse over them and otehrs are underlined all the itme (I'm using firefox) - ah no, I've worked that one out - the underlined are already visited links, and the not aren't.
I'm also interested in what the groups that are springing up first are interested in. Doing a search on the top zeitgeist authors, Tolkien, Lewis and Austen are already mentioned in group descriptions, but Rowling, Pratchett and Gaiman aren't yet. Fun to watch that grow and change.
I've got Windows MX and IE6, and I'm seeing the same thing Eurydice is: a painfully tiny field for entering the posting. It's the same width as the word Message above it.
By the way, the Joy tab that hyperlinks to the Extras page? It's called that everywhere except on the Blog page, where it appears as Fun/Tools.
I honestly don't know which I prefer, but whichever one you do, I thought you might like to know there's a wee discrepancy there :-)
Error message when leaving a group [and once I had a similar or possibly identical one when joining a group]:
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/tspalding/live.librarything.com/data/inc_slaves.php:12) in /home/tspalding/live.librarything.com/data/leavegroup.php on line 14
It went through just fine [it's no longer shown in my profile page], but I'm assuming that's not supposed to happen. [Firefox 1.5.0.4, Windows XP].
I started a philosophy group purely because there wasn't already one, and I assumed one would be needed sooner or later. But, while I'm not the proselytizing kind, I'm wondering what, if any, are the appropriate channels for promoting a group. For example, would it be considered bad form to invite everyone who uses related tags very frequently? I'm inclined to think it might be.
And/or, is there a central announce channel -- ideally, an rss feed -- for new groups that interested LT users can watch for groups they may want to join?
For example, would it be considered bad form to invite everyone who uses related tags very frequently? I'm inclined to think it might be.
I don't know, but I confess I invited the top taggers in a couple of groups I joined or created. If wrong, my apologies; but it seemed rather unobtrusive, and a few did seem pleased.
However, another avenue would be welcome.
There should be a group page that tells you which of your books are shared by the group, or are common in the group. Or something...
The link behind "Most recent members: [...] - 49 total" goes to http://www.librarything.com/groupzeitgeist.php
which displays "Group Zeitgeist: No such group."
< aside > I understand that you want to use as litte space as possible when naming the tabs, but I think "Fun/Tools" was a much better name than "Joy". < /aside >
Best wishes :-)
sunny
Thanks for the groups feature, it looks like it was a hit.
Still, with the creation of more and more groups, won't we see a proliferation of similar groups? Won't that put too much stress on the servers? Maybe there should be a merging of groups, when their goal is obviously the same.
Oh well, just my two cents.
LT is getting better every day. Thanks for creating it!
Would it be difficult to have a second complete group list, but with 'date created' in addition to the alphabetical one? Or a link to the whole chronological list after the ones showing up under "Newest groups"?
Btw: some of the descriptions under "Newest groups" just got a bold font.
sunny
Ok - found the link to "Sort: recent" ;-)
Just want to say, "Thanks for the new time sink!" (said with a smile)
The touchstone linking with the brackets just doesn't work and I believe I do it exactly as described. I tried from two different computers. It always links to the main group page. Example: my entry in the "Humor" group.
"There should be a group page that tells you which of your books are shared by the group, or are common in the group. Or something..."
Yes. We release the minimum, and then build!
sunny: Fixed. You don't like joy? Why are you against joy? Are you against peace and love?
Thalia. Will look.
YAY! I already loved LT but now it feels like a much more cozy place with the addition of groups.
I'm looking foward to getting to know my fellow LTers better.
Thanks, Tim!
Oh no! There goes more of my free time. :o What a wonderful addition to the site.
If I could suggest one thing, it would be the ability to edit one's posts.
Seconded! Both because it is depressing to see one's typos forever enshrined, and because the 'Romance, from Austen to Byatt to Crusie' group already has a stuck italics tag that we can't close.
Edit or at least preview would be a nice addition, yes.
"You don't like joy? Why are you against joy?"
Nothing wrong with joy as such; I just think the other name fitted better. And for me the joy of LT lies in other features than the ones in that tab.
sunny :-)
Ditto on "edit comments" - I improperly bracketed the touchstones in a post (because I didn't read it correctly), and now they are links to some Internet abyss.
I dunno. We may change the name weekly, just to stir the pot...ycz
I'd also be nervous of the delete group function. Great for ones that never get off the ground, or have a slightly wrong names, or if they decide to go and merge with s imilar group, etc, but if a lot of people put time and effort and many posts into a group, and then the originator packs a sad and deletes it there is likely to be much upset, based on past messageboard experiences.
I'm relieved that I'm not the only one (by far) who has problems with the touchstones. And I'm no dummy on the computer... I come across links that look like mine in pretty much all the groups.
So Tim, either invite us over to Maine for a course on touchstones or make it even easier :-)
Aquila: I think you can only delete a group if it's empty. Deleting a post is, I think, a good thing to have. Some forums only allow you to do it (or edit) if no more have been added after. But that has problems when traffic is high.
On touchstones: This is very much on the agenda. We're working on the groups generally today. For now, the touchstones feature are sort of "beta"...
I'm guessing it's a combination of browser error, user error and server delays.
Here's a little addition to the touchstones comments. I found that they don't work if you put punctuation in them. So, for example, it is impossible to link to Dos Passos's meisterwerk, U.S.A.. This also means that apostrophes have to be placed outside the square brackets to make a link work, thus: [[Fitzgerald]]'s.
Great idea to add groups to LT, but perhaps we could have an option in our profiles to collapse our group list?
A sort of +/- button to list our groups so that when people view our profiles they aren't overwhelmed by the number of groups. (I'm a big joiner...:()
Arianne, Good idea. We'll make it show the first X of them, with a more link. Thanks, Tim
Thanks, Tim! :) I'm well chuffed!
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